/misplay
Exhibited/Screened in:
Playtime, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA, 2018
Angela Washko: Poking the Hive, Georgetown University Gallery, Fairfax VA, 2018
Rabbithole, Foxhole, Wormhole: Anne Buckwalter and Angela Washko, Pilot Projects, Philadelphia PA, 2017
Angela Washko: Performing in Public, gallery@calit2, University of California - San Diego, 2016
/misplay was a performance made in collaboration with Andre Faupel, Ashin Mandal, Ephraim Schott, Hagen Hiller, Marina Belikova, Meike Halle and Mihail Mihaylov. It was created in conjunction with a course I taught at Bauhaus University called Collaboratively Choreographed Online Interventions through which I worked with students to stage gestural performances in a number of different multi user digital environments.
In /misplay, my collaborators and I started a parade of as-naked-as-one-can-get-in-wow orc and troll avatars wandering the landscape making chicken noises, roaring and encouraging the participation of others as a resistance to imposed competitive game rules and as a way of rethinking of what types of actions could take place in the epic game landscape. This project was an extension of a larger body of performative and participatory work I had been doing inside World of Warcraft as The World of Warcraft Psychogeographical Association. Over the course of a typical day spent operating as The World of Warcraft Psychogeographical Association, I followed players' paths, encouraged players to share with me parts of the landscape they find most interesting, explored WoW’s vast continents, danced with animal AI, avoided engaging in combat, jumped from beautiful waterfalls, died repeatedly by ignoring designed limitations, flied to the moon, and contemplated this epic digital world of which much is now completely useless and no longer navigated by other players due to gameplay restructuring designed for faster and more efficient leveling trajectories to keep players paying monthly.